Rivals CNBC and CNNfn pulled out all the stops to provide minute-by-minute coverage for over two hours yesterday afternoon, both from the floor of the frenzied New York Stock Exchange and from their respective studios.

“There’s never been a day like this,” CNBC president Bill Bolster said. “It shows the sophistication of investors that the market went down and came right back up with people seeing its potential.

“It definitely wasn’t a normal day, but it was a data-driven day where we were watching it go on as an event.”

Yesterday’s market shocker was big enough that CNN switched from its regular coverage and began carrying the feed of sister network CNNfn at around 1:30 p.m. — after tech stocks plunged at an alarming rate.

“This was definitely one of our biggest days,” said Darius Walker, CNNfn’s vice president of news coverage.

“We had a situation I call ‘all hands on deck,’ and this was one of them,” Walker said. “That’s where we went to people who specialize in different areas of market and tell them what to expect of them.”

Veteran CNNfn market reporter Rhonda Schaffler repeatedly warned viewers not to get too distraught over the downward plunge, saying it was “too early” to assume the market wouldn’t recover (it did, to a point).

A CNBC reporter, perhaps caught up in the moment, labeled the day as “the worst in [market] history.”

At around 1:35 p.m., CNBC cut to Chicago to focus on bond markets. “What you’re seeing is an emotional sell-off,” said one bond reporter, who compared the plunge to the 1987 market meltdown.